Week 2 Day 2 – I got work done!!

I think the biggest difference between Week 1 & Week 2 is that I feel so much more settled and at home now. Coming to Recurse Center every day is routine, and it’s familiar. It’s like a home in a way, and it’s very easy to spend all day there (in fact, my favorite days are the days I stay till 11pm or midnight). There’s a feeling of safety and security. It’s a safe place to explore & try & take my time & work on the things that are important to me.

Today was a really productive day!! And yet, continuing the Quality vs. Quantity theme from yesterday, the list of things I actually did doesn’t seem that big.

I basically worked on Blitting and Tile Mapping all day. This is probably the most time I’ve spent actually coding on projects so far (about 4 hrs).

Here’s where I left off for the day:

I also attended the Regular Expressions workshop, and I’m really glad I did that. Regular Expressions are a bit of a mind-twister, but they’re no longer completely alien, and I have a context for them now. I’ll put them on the back burner for sure, but I’d definitely like to explore them more before the completion of my batch. (Similarly, I’d like to explore Django & Unity – I think they’ll all be relevant to post-RC job finding). That’s not going to happen for at least another 3-6 weeks, but they’ll be in the back of my mind for when I get there.

Later in the day, I finally learned what lambda is (an anonymous function that’s not bound to a name at Run Time) … in actual use, it seems somewhat similar to List Comprehensions, but maybe as I encounter it out in the wild more, I’ll alter my opinion of it.

I’m really happy about the amount I’ve learned over the last week. I feel so much more confident as a programmer than I did a week ago, and feel a lot more able to complete large projects or solve relatively complex tasks. I know I’ve got *tons* more to go, and I’m really glad I’m making the progress that I am.

I started the day off with my phone in my pocket – which made it much easier to avoid distractions. I also made it a point to take breaks today – nothing huge (and I didn’t make it to the gym), but just random little breaks of “Let me watch an episode of Steven Universe”, or “take a break on the bean bag in the library”. Those helped me not feel overwhelmed and exhausted, and helped me get better work done. Breaks are important!!

Checkins were awesome today, and I’m starting a Tutorial involving creating a scrolling map via Tile Mapping and using the Sprite Class. There’s also a Sublime workshop tomorrow, plus Algorithms and Design Patterns – so I’m super thrilled for all the workshops tomorrow!!

Excited to keep Moving Forward!

Edit: I forgot to mention – I downloaded Unity and am definitely gonna start learning & playing with that sometime in the next week.